In marketing and in life, you have to say no. And there are two ways to do that: on purpose, or on accident.
People often assume that marketing is all about creativity. And that’s a sensible assumption to make because people see flashy designs, clever slogans, funny advertisements, and viral TikToks.
But, of course, that’s not the full picture. Nobody sees Michelangelo’s statue of David and thinks about all the rocks that aren’t there when the finished statue is right in front of them.
Fact: every marketer, no matter how brilliant or well-resourced, will eventually slam into one of two brick walls. Money or time. Your budget is finite and your labor hours are finite, and you cannot escape these constraints entirely no matter what you do.
Scope control is the act of deliberately limiting what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it—so you can do it well.
Great marketing takes time, experimentation, and patience. No one can deny that.
But that doesn’t mean you have infinite tries. So what matters isn’t just what you try, but what you don’t. The discipline to focus is what separates mediocre marketing from great marketing.
Underneath every smart campaign is a quiet decision: this is in, that is out. In other words, it’s scope control.
You can’t do every kind of marketing at once.
A lot of people say “let’s try it all.” So they do SEO, Facebook ads, LinkedIn founder-style content, TikTok dances, email campaigns (warm and cold), and affiliate marketing. Surely something is going to work, right?
Not necessarily, and doing all that for no return is expensive.
I’ve seen companies spread themselves thin across six or more channels, only to hit diminishing returns. And it had nothing to do with lack of skill, but rather simple overextension. Those that narrowed their focus ended up doing much better in the long run.
The difference isn’t brilliance, but bandwidth.
On the flip side, I remember working with one particular client who was getting by almost entirely on brand recognition and some Google ads that weren’t returning much. When I started working with them, there were a million things I could have done, but I prioritized fixing the Google ads and restarting the blog with an SEO-first strategy. Revenue doubled that year.
Even without perfect execution, basic scope control alone made it possible to get two channels up and running to maturity. And that paved the way for much more dramatic growth in the years to follow as well.
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If you try to do too much, you will pay one way or another.
Overreach is expensive, even if it doesn’t look that way on paper. But when teams push too hard in too many directions, the bill will come due and it will be in ways that your accountant will notice.
It could be any of the following:
Paying too many marketers to work on one project inefficiently because they’re stepping on one another’s toes and can’t coordinate.
Revenue that never materializes, because campaigns don’t perform since no one has the bandwidth to do proper and, frankly, basic A/B testing.
Ad spending, influencer payments, sponsorships, and other high-cost marketing budget sinks.
There’s also more insidious types of waste that won’t show up on your P&L either like employee disengagement. You run the risk of burning out workers if they’re overutilized—even if this happens while they don’t have the space they need to deliver on any individual project.
Growing companies tend to mess this up. And that’s because the pressure to grow fast is enormous!
But scaling does not mean doing everything at once. Scaling is a sequenced affair. You need one channel to work, then another, and another, and so on. This is graduated scope control.
Keeping scope in check doesn’t mean staying lean forever. It just means giving campaigns the space they need to go from infancy to childhood to adulthood.
The cadence of marketing used to be slower, forcing teams to commit to a path, try it out, and see what happens. Not saying it was better back then by any means, but historical context helps us see modern scope problems for what they really are: prioritization issues.
Who actually owns marketing scope?
Here’s a messy truth: no one owns scope by default. But everyone contributes to the mess when it’s missing.
But in messy reality, someone has to move first. And that can be devilishly difficult if you are in a situation like this:
The founder says yes to every idea out of either optimism of fear of missing out. The CMO plays it cautious and hedges bets across five different channels instead of going all in on two or three. The copywriter is forced to write based on a vague and contradictory brief and ends up making a technically sound piece that doesn’t knock it out of the park with any reader. The designer has to follow brand guidelines that got made by a committee. The strategist spends more time arguing about priorities than delivering results.
I am immensely sympathetic to the folks caught up in all that. You know and I know that no one is trying to sabotage the work. They’re all following the incentives in front of them. But no one owns scope, the work is fuzzy, and the priorities are diffuse.
The answer isn’t more meetings. Someone has to assign ownership and hold the line. Someone needs to say: “this is what we’re doing, this is what we’re not doing, and here’s why.”
Ideally, this comes from the top. But any mission-critical person in an organization can start putting their house in order and making it easier for others to do the same.
Why is it so hard to enforce marketing scope?
Saying no is much harder in practice than in theory. You can rehearse all day in your head what you want to say only to flinch at the last minute.
It’s emotional labor, and hard emotional labor at that. When you say no, someone is going to be disappointed. Your sales rep might not get a custom landing page. A junior team member might think they’re not being creative enough. And a department head might get steamed that their pet project didn’t make the cut.
In the fog of the moment, scope control feels like failure. But it’s actually just one of the most uncomfortable parts of leadership!
Failing to say no will keep you in a constant cycle of reaction. And that reaction guarantees short-term thinking and the mediocrity that necessarily comes with it.
So sure, validate the discomfort. Recognize the reality of it. And push through anyway because you need the clarity that’s on the other side of it.
But here’s the good news: you probably already have the muscle built up for scope control, as I’ll explain below.
Everyday marketing is fundamentally an exercise in scope control.
Have you ever written brand guidelines? An ideal customer profile? A content calendar or even a content brief? Ever turn down a channel like SEO or TikTok because you don’t have the energy for it?
You’re already doing scope control.
Have you ever written a headline that had to fit in 60 characters or less?
Even that is scope control. You have to figure out which handful of words in the English language belong in that headline.
Every one of these common marketing tasks means making choices to reduce ambiguity. Every single one of them forces clarity.
Brand guidelines help you figure out how you’re going to look and sound and how you’re not going to look and sound.
Ideal customer profiles help you figure out who to market to and who not to market to.
You get the idea.
Scope control is not glamorous. In fact, it’s often invisible. But it’s the foundation of every campaign that works.
So the trick is to find the marketing techniques that have scope control built in and to avoid flinching when you’re forced to make a hard yes/no choice.
Practical ways to limit marketing scope
Scope control doesn’t have to be abstract. There are a lot of ways that you can build it into your everyday marketing practice.
Practice prioritizing. If you’re not sure where to start, choose one customer profile, one core offer, and one core marketing channel. You can always pivot later if you need to and narrowing your focus will help you avoid the worst trap—trying to be everything to everyone.
Limit testing variables. You need to run marketing tests, but keep it as simple as you can. Change one thing at a time and see what the impact is before making sweeping changes across the board.
Say no on purpose. It’s OK to say “we don’t have time or budget for that.” But it’s even better to say “we’re choosing not to do that because it’s outside of our scope.” That kind of reframing matters and helps you feel like you have a choice (which you do).
Accept tradeoffs. Every good scope decision leaves something valuable on the table. But that doesn’t mean it’s a mistake.
Scope control is about doing less and better. It’s about making peace with constraints. And though it seems like a paradox to say so, it will set you free to do the work that makes a difference.
The best marketers are unapologetic editors.
Marketing is editing and it always has been.
And, sure, a lot of that means editing words. But you also have to edit strategy, messaging, budget line items, as well as the way you allocate time and focus.
Good marketers make a limited number of smart bets. Because, counterintuitive as it might seem, this is far safer than trying to keep every idea and appease every dissenter.
Good marketing isn’t more, more, more. Subtract the nonsense, and you can multiply your results.
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